Monday, May 4, 2015

Clare Strand is a British artist who mostly works with lens based media and in doing so defies the obvious, abandons convention and takes risks. The result - surreal, demanding work that is open to innumerable possibilities.
Currently showing at London's Grimaldi Gavin Getting Better and Worse at the Same Time is an exhibition of balanced opposites; better and worse, backwards and forwards, up and down and in and out.

The exhibition employs kinetic machines, film and photography to reveal Strand’s discordant relationship with the photographic medium, exploring its promise and limitations through unexpected and eccentric means.

The Happenstance Generator is a large Perspex chamber on a metal plinth. Inside the chamber a selection of the artist’s archives of research images from the past 30 years, will be blown about by hidden fans. The machine will randomly propel images towards the transparent surfaces of the chamber, before being repositioned again by the movement of the air. The images will be highlighted for one moment and disappear the next; much in the way that data and image sequences appear and disappear, grow and diminish in importance, in the constantly changing landscape of everyday visual encounters.

The Entropy Pendulum will have a selected photographic print positioned under its constantly swinging weight. As the pendulum arm swings back and forth, it will rub against the work and over the course of a day will gradually erase parts of the image. Each day throughout the exhibition, a photograph will take its place under the weight of the pendulum, gradually filling up the 35 empty frames on the gallery wall.

The third machine, Control in Motion, is a mutoscope based on an early motion picture device invented in the late 19th century. Working on the same principle as a flip-book but with a circular core, like a Rolodex, a series of 100 pages, representing the subtle grades of the tonal system from black to white, will rotate in a constant motion. With each rotation the cards experience a very slight degradation, initially undetectable to the human eye, but noticeable over time.

The British Journal of Photography spoke with Clare Strand, you can read the piece HERE.

Getting Better and Worse at the Same Time – New work by Clare Strand is
on show until 6 June at Grimaldi Gavin, 27 Albemarle Street, London W1S
4DW. www.grimaldigavin.com

About Me

My pictures explore the strange anthropology of cities. The unusual and overlooked in the human landscape.
I am asking the viewer to question the idea that photographs as documents are complete representations of subject.
I'm interested in the universality of life and the idea of parallel lives - when one thing is happening here, something else is happening over there. The democracy of non-places fascinates me, in the knowledge that inevitably nothing is as it seems.
I work and live between Auckland and Paris.
http://harveybenge.com/
email:harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz